Peas are my favourite thing to grow. I grow all kinds – traditional shelling peas (some of them get frozen for winter use), crisp and crunchy snap peas, delicate thin snow peas, and soup peas to dry for the winter. All of them grow well here, though there are a few pests and diseases, and dry peas are far more reliable than dry beans if you’re growing them for winter protein.

Read on for my favorite varieties of the different kinds:

Shelling Peas

Meteor – a UK variety that grows small pods on small plants but is the fastest pea I’ve ever tried. Always the first shelling pea to be picked, this is always part of the first early batch of peas I plant.

Green Arrow – a tallish bush that is super-reliable and a good cropper. My standard for any planting date.

Tall Telephone – takes longer than bush peas to crop, but then keeps on growing and setting new pods until it succumbs to powdery mildew. I’ve been selecting these for longer pods and more pods per vine, from a rather raggedy initial commercial batch from a cheap seed company.

Snap Peas

Sugar Snap – a vine that just keeps going and going

Cascadia – bush pea that’s very reliable

Snow Peas

Oregon sugar pod – big pods, bush plants, long season

Purple podded snow pea – this is an old variety that doesn’t have the tenderest pods but it’s worth it for the bright purple colour!

Soup Peas

Carlin – this has been my standard for many years. It’s strong-growing vine that dries down very reliably by the first week in August, thus avoiding the September rains that ruin so many dry bean crops here. Again, I am doing some selecting on this for more pods, bigger pods, and stronger vines.

This year I’ll be trying several new-to-me soup peas: Swedish Red, Ancient Peas, Gold Harvest and Golden Edible Pod (which can be used as a snow pea or dried for a soup pea). I’ll probably have seed to share at Seedy Saturday in 2015.

When I started growing my own transplants, the setup was pretty rickety. After a cat-related disaster one day, I realised that I had to have something better. Commercial light stands at $500+ were out of my budget, so I built my own – and so can you. Here are instructions and drawings: if you want, you can download a printable version.

Man, there’s a lot of gardening info out there! Online, (including Kindle and other eBooks), there’s a lot of junk thrown up by those looking to make a quick buck from ads or product sales, but there’s also a lot of solid info. Here are my picks:

GrowGuide helps you plan a vegetable garden by informing you what you can sow, harden off, or transplant, week by week, based on your frost dates, in just four easy steps.

Starting Vegetables from Seed

How to Grow Vegetables: Direct Seeding Outside
Direct seeding outside has many advantages for most kinds of vegetables, though it’s not the best solution for all of them.Starting tomato seed
Starting tomatoes from seed is really quite easy to do. Some good light, a sterile, well drained soil mix, some warmth and good seed is all that is needed.You can start your tomatoes begining 6-8 weeks before you want to set them out…Vegetable Seeds – The Official Seed-Starting Home Page
The Official Seed Starting Home Page assists you in all your seed starting needs. Get fast facts on starting vegetable, herb, and flower seeds for your garden. One page of facts is devoted to each seed.Seed Starting – How to Successfully Start Plants from Seed
Starting plants from seed isn’t rocket science, but there are several seed starting tips that will help your success rate with seed germination and give your seedlings a healthy start. Here’s how to start seeds indoors and the seed starting supplies you’ll need to grow plants from seed.Seed Starting (Fine Gardening Magazine)
How a practiced propagator gets seedlings off to a healthy start

Soil and Bed Preparation for Vegetables

Preparing a New Raised Bed Vegetable Garden
There are a number of different ways to make a new raised bed vegetable garden. Some work better on a larger scale, some depend on having soil present to start with, others take more or less physical effort.No-dig vegetable garden – TipThePlanet
A no dig garden, or raised garden bed, consists of layering organic materials on top of the soil to create a nutrient rich environment for your plants, in this case, vegetables. The garden literally composts the materials…Master Gardener Manual: Soil Preparation
Master Gardener Manual: Home Vegetable Garden – SOIL PREPARATION
Arizona Cooperative Extension, College of Agriculture, The University of Arizona.

Watering and Irrigating Vegetable Gardens

Vegetable Garden Irrigation (Tips.Net)
A variety of methods can be used to irrigate your vegetable garden, ranging from very simple to complex. The easiest solution is to hand water the plants with a garden hose or a watering bucket. More complex systems use sprinklers, and the most complex systems use drip irrigation.<Watering – Vegetable Gardening
Vegetable gardens usually need about one inch of water (630 gallons per 1,000 square feet) per week in the form of rain or irrigation during the growing season.Gardening Without Irrigation (or without much, anyway)
Full text of Steve Solomon’s book “Water-wise vegetables”. Especially useful to maritime gardeners in areas like Cascadia, but has much to say to all gardeners.

Growing Vegetables in Winter

Fall and Winter Vegetable Planting Guide
Fall and Winter gardening, although an old practice, is an excellent solution for keeping the tilth and fertility of your garden’s soil at its peak levels. At the same time it yields crops of delicious vegetables throughout the fall and winter.Winter Vegetable Gardening
Winter Gardening – what to grow, when and where. From Organic Gardening Magazine.Winter Planting Guide
When to plant winter vegetables in BC – from West Coast Seeds

With onions being staples of the kitchen, and leeks being a reliable winter vegetable for us here in Powell River, lots of people grow them. With all the different varieties out there, how do you choose?

Onions

First let’s get the long-day / short-day thing out of the way. Areas in the southern US need onions which bulb when days are short, and you’ll come across these if you’re using a US seed catalog which sells to these areas (like Park Seeds). Here, we need “long day onions”, and if you are using a Canadian seed catalog, you’ll get this kind without worrying about it. You’ll also see onions described as “day neutral” which means they don’t care about day length – those are fine to use here, as well.

There are a number of different things to consider when picking varieties. The most important two are flavor (sweet, strong, mild, etc) and storage life. What you pick depends on your own preferences for flavour, and the purpose you have in mind for storage life. The two things almost always run together so that stronger-flavoured onions have a longer storage life, and sweeter onions don’t store as long.

Long-storage, strong flavoured onions are seeded in the spring and mature in the fall. if we get a wet fall, it’s hard to get them to mature properly and that affects their storage life, so the earlier in spring they are started, the better. Varieties I use include

Copra F1 – reliable and consistent in size, but you can’t save seed

Sturon OP – grows nice onions, don’t know about storage length since we eat thme before they have a chance to demonstrate it!

Calibra OP – new for me this year, similar to Copra but OP so you can save seed.

Red storage onions are also available, though they tend not to store quite as well as the yellow ones. I haven’t grown these, but West Coast Seeds has an OP called “Rossa di Milano” as well as some F1s.

Sweet, mild-flavoured onions are often overwintering types that are seeded in July or August and harvested the following year. They don’t store well but are great while you have them. The classic variety is Walla Walla. There are also huge sweet onions which are grown like storage onions but don’t store well, like Ailsa Craig.

What about sets? They seem easier to grow than seeded onions, but in my experience you don’t get the consistency (many go to seed the first year, or split into several bulbs) and often the actual variety isn’t stated so you don’t really know what you’re getting apart from a broad category. If you miss the planting window for seeds, and can’t get seedlings, they will give you a chance at a crop, though.

Leeks

Leeks are split into two broad categories, summer and winter. Summer leeksare fast growing and will give you a decent sized (though not huge) leek by fall, before the winter weather sets in. They are often not very frost hardy so can’t be left in the garden over winter. Winter leeksgrow more slowly but are much hardier, and will continue to grow through the winter during mild spells to large sizes – sometimes huge. You can harvest them right through to April if you don’t eat them all first!

My current summer leek is Varna, which is a really fast grower, useful in my cool garden. For winter leeks I currently use Bandit and Siegfried Frost, and in the past I’ve had good results with Durabel, which is not so easy to find now. All those leek varieties are OP: you can find F1 leeks but they haven’t yet overrun the catalogs.

If you have trouble growing or storing storage onions, leeks are a very good alternative in our area. I’ve never had ours eaten by deer, even in winter.

What size of garden you build depends on how much space you have, and how much time and energy for maintenance. Even if you have unlimited space, you are better off starting with a small space that you can keep up with (and expanding later), than taking on too much at the start and having it end up a disappointing jungle of weeds.

Pots and Planters
No soil, or horrible soil? Then you can grow a wide variety of food in pots and containers, anything from black plastic nursery pots to large wooden planters. I spent 13 years in a townhouse with 2 concrete patios where the built-in planters were already full of shrubs and small trees. I grew food every year in an eclectic container mix varying from pots bought at a nursery, to wooden planters built from old shipping pallets, to some 24″ diameter ceramic pots found in a dumpster! Pots are very convenient as you can move them from time to time to bring plants into and out of the sun, and take them with you when you move. When I moved into that townhouse it was September and I brought a dozen tomato plants in 5 gal buckets with me from my old place. The neighbors immediately christened me the “mad gardener”! My movers thought I was nuts too…

Edible landscaping
You don’t need to confine your food plants to dedicated beds or containers. Mix them in with your ornamental plants: lettuce and parsley as edgings, eggplants and tomatoes as annual “shrubs”, grapes or kiwifruit as permanent vines, peas and beans as annual fence-and-trellis coverers.

Small Plots
If you do have some soil, but your space is small so whatever you do is going to be on display, then small raised beds are a good choice for you. The borders round the beds make them seem more “intentional” and decorative, and the extra depth means that you can improve on whatever soil you already have. More details below on building raised beds!

Larger gardens
If you have more room, there are several ways to go.

One is the traditional vegetable garden with long rows of plants, often tilled each spring using a power tiller.

Another is to take your plot and split it into permanent beds about 3-4 ft wide, divided by paths, so that you never walk on the cultivated beds. This is currently a very popular way to lay out a vegetable garden, and it’s the way my own garden is designed. Permanent beds help with crop rotation (changing positions of plant families every year so that pests and diseases don’t build up) and allow you to build up really good soil in the beds – you apply all the good stuff only to the beds, not to the paths. Because of the good soil you can often plant closer and pack more plants into each bed. If the beds are raised, drainage will be better and the soil will warm faster in the spring.

Many people feel that using peat in the garden is environmentally irresponsible, and are looking for alternatives. This article describes coir and leaf mould as alternatives to peat.

Coir is now widely available locally. It comes from coconut husks (a by-product of coconut processing for food) and you can get it in various textures ranging from coarse chunks to quite fine fibres. It soaks up and holds water well. One big advantage over peat when used in potting soil is that it doesn’t shrink and pull away from the side of the pot if it dries out. The biggest downside to coir for us in Canada is that it has to be transported long distances from its source in India, Sri Lanka and the Pacific.

Leaf mould is not something you buy, it’s something you make in your own garden from local leaves. As such, it’s free in terms of dollars, but it takes time – a little of your time to gather the leaves and store them in a way that will allow them to transform themselves, and several years for the transformation to happen. It’s a long term project but one which can become part of your garden schedule.

Leaf mould contains a range of micronutrients for plants, and is normally about pH neutral. It holds water very well. You make it by stacking leaves in a big pile and leaving it to rot, or by filling plastic garbage bags with leaves and letting them rot. Because leaves are decomposed mostly by fungi, oxygen isn’t needed as much as with a compost pile, but moisture definitely is. Some kind of enclosure is useful to keep the leaves from blowing away. Shredding them before storing will speed up decomposition, but unshredded leaves will work fine, just take longer. A mix of leaves will rot better than all one kind, and adding a bit of compost or soil to the pile will get things started more quickly.

Plants need sun, water, air and nutrients, and where you choose to place your garden will have a big effect on all of those. While you can bring water and nutrients to the garden, you need to pick the best spot for sun and air from the start.

While some vegetables will manage with less than full sun, most of the ones we value the most in our home gardens (tomatoes, anyone?) need plenty of sun. Your climate affects this, though: if you are in a hot and sunny climate your garden may need afternoon shade, whereas if you are in the cloudy Pacific Northwest like me, you need all the sun you can get! So, choose a location that gets at least 6-8 hours of sun but does not get overheated if your climate is hot.

“Air” really has several aspects: ventilation to prevent disease, wind protection, and pooling of cold air.

Many plant diseases are fungal in nature and good ventilation and air circulation can help to prevent them. For most gardens this won’t be a problem, but if you are tucked into a corner you might have some issues. Trade off ventilation against warmth, depending on your climate. If it’s cool and breezy in your location, choose warmth. If your climate tends towards warm and humid, choose better ventilation.

Wind can flatten young and even established plants, and blow away dry soil. If your area is windy and you can choose a more protected area, do so. Otherwise, there are many ways to provide windbreaks.

Cold air flows downhill, but can pool and cause more frost that normal if something like a wall or thick hedge blocks the flow. Ideally your garden area will allow cold air to flow away downhill, rather than trap it.

One more thing to think about when you are choosing where to place your garden is the slope of the ground. A slight slope won’t cause erosion problems, but the more sloped your ground is, the more likely your soil is to wash away when it’s not covered with vegetation. You may need to terrace your slope, or put borders along the lower edges of beds. Look out for places where water flows into your garden area from uphill, too, and make sure you can divert and make use of the water so it doesn’t damage the garden. Look into the use of “swales”, shallow ditches which slow down water flow and allow it to soak into the ground rather than causing erosion.

The slope direction also counts: a slope towards the sun can mean that your soil warms earlier in the spring and cools later in the fall. A slope away from the sun means a cooler garden. If the slope away-from-the-sun is slight you can work around it by sloping individual beds towards the sun, but if it’s a substantial slope it will make a real difference to how early you can get a harvest.

Recommended for plants which don’t like their roots disturbed
No actual container at all
Conserves space in trays and under lights
Small blocks fit neatly into spaces in larger blocks for “potting on”

Soil blocker to make the blocks is fairly expensive (but a one-time expense)
Needs suitable soil mix
Takes practice to make good blocks
Some plants don’t like the compacted soil in the blocks

Personally, I use a mix of basic plastic inserts I already own (re-used many times over, then recycled) and soil blocks. Both go in plastic trays I have had for years, mended when they start to leak, and eventually recycled when they fall apart completely. I plan to build wood trays from salvaged cedar when I run out pf plastic trays. For clear lids, I use a mix of clear plastic purpose-made lids, and reused sheets of clear plastic from old 1970’s illuminated ceilings.

I’m not big on making resolutions for the New Year, but maybe I should be! There are a few things I could do that would make gardening more productive, and maybe even more fun…

Keep better records. I do keep some, especially to do with seeding and transplanting dates, but I rely on (fallible) memory for a lot of other things. It would be especially interesting to have a record of harvest amounts and dates, something I did when I was market gardening and selling my produce, but not since.

Rebuild the hoophouse! The poor thing has been sitting there uncovered for 18 months now, and it’s not doing us any good that way. Plus, it looks messy.

Make a place to relax in the garden, and then relax in it. Without getting up to “just pull a few weeds over there…”

Build surrounds around some of our heaped-up raised beds. We’ve got the wood, and it needs doing… I just get overtaken by the need to Plant Something In That Bed and before you know it, building a surround round the planted bed would cause too much disturbance.

I could keep going, there are so many plans and ideas that would be great to turn into reality, but there’s only so much time and energy in one year!

Permaculture stands for “permanent agriculture” or, more recently, “permanent culture”: a way of designing gardens, landscapes, farms, neighbourhoods and communities that is permanent, in other words sustainable in the long run. There’s a lot to it, and there are many places to learn: Here’s a collection of places where you can discover more.

Permaculture institutes, associations, etc

Permaculture Institute is an educational non-profit, offering Permaculture Design Courses and in-depth sustainable living classes at different locations in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Mexico and South America.

The Mission of the Permaculture Research Institute USA is to work with communities worldwide, to expand the knowledge and practice of integrated sustainable agriculture using the whole-systems approach of Permaculture Design. This will provide solutions for permanent abundance by training local people to become leaders of sustainable development in their communities and countries.

Introductory Articles

This publication offers definitions and descriptions of permaculture and its central principles. It offers listings of resources and publications on permaculture in the United States, Australia, and worldwide. (ATTRA)

Permaculture Design Courses and Workshops

This project aims to bring Permaculture into the heart of the Powell River community, and to use Permaculture to bring the community into the heart of a public space that’s full of potential. Design Courses are taught by Ron Berezan and Erin Innes.

Based in Victoria, connects bio-regionally experienced and knowledgeable instructors focusing on theory and hands-on activity for students to graduate with the highest amount of retention, application and inspiration needed to create a positive sustainable future.

Permaculture forums and discussions

Permaculture Forum – GardenWeb (N America)
This forum is meant for the discussion of permaculture. Permaculture is most easily defined as a philosophy that stresses the maintenance of horticulture or agriculture by relying on renewable resources and compatibility with the local ecosystem.

Plant Lists for Permaculture

Plants For A Future – 7000 useful plants
Plants For A Future is a resource centre for rare and unusual plants, particularly those which have edible, medicinal or other uses. We practice vegan-organic permaculture with emphasis on creating an ecologically sustainable environment and perennial plants.

Planting Justice
The mission of Planting Justice is to democratize access to affordable, nutritious food by empowering disenfranchised urban residents with the skills, inspiration, and paid opportunities we need to maximize food production and natural beauty in our neighborhoods.